don't eat alone

I love a good conversation among friends. We make each other better when we challenge, when we question, and when we dream — together. My post from last night brought three notes my way that kept me thinking and praying about what needs to happen here in our town, across the country, and around the world — and what my part in it is, beyond a blog post. I offer them tonight without my response, in hopes that the conversation will both broaden and continue.
The first came from a friend in Memphis:

Hey Milty, Hope  you are well.

As usual, you started my day off by rattling my cage. So today, instead of just reading I have a question for you: what exactly, specifically, do I do? Wasting time with legislative lobbying is one thing. I can do some of that. But what exactly can I do today to start making this better.

Finding a family and giving them money doesn’t help. Every professional aid agency I have ever heard from says that doesn’t work. I give to local aid organizations. I have my company giving to them. You say “support, engagement: allies” . Define that for me.

Adopt a family? Adopt an individual? Give them financial aid until….? When does it become co-dependent? Not helpful? What about the corruption in their families where the clothes or resources for the family are taken and sold or re-allocated by folks around them? It seems to me to be mobilized to do some good people like me need more specifics or actionable steps.

The last two came independently of one another, though I go to church with both of them. The first came by email:

Hi Milton,
I just read your blog post.  I’m sorry to have missed last night’s program because of work.  Your post reminded me of Momastery.  I don’t know if you’re familiar with the website.  I can’t remember who I’ve talked to about it.  Anyway, yesterday, there was a “love flash mob” going on.  This is (at least) the 3rd time it’s happened.  The idea was to raise $85,000 online to change someone’s life.  The kicker is that each person can only donate a maximum of $25.  The money was raised in less than 6 hours yesterday.  I wanted to share in case you hadn’t heard of it.  It’s right up your alley, and I think it epitomizes a Durham-like can-do approach.  Last night, as the Faith Approach to Poverty Series was going on, a teenage mother and her infant son who were homeless yesterday morning were moving into their new home in Indiana.

Yesterday’s story;

one from last May and the followup;

one from last February and the followup.

The second was  Facebook post:

Read your blog post today and thought of another blog I follow: www.momastery.com. It’s all about “small things with great love”. Yesterday, the blog followers (called Monkees) raised $110 thousand dollars in 15 hours — part of the catch is that the maximum limit per person was $25 and many gave less than that. The Monkees far exceeded the $83k they were aiming for — that $83k literally took a teen mom and her 4 month old into the care of a non-profit home for the next yea — that mama and her baby had a safe and warm place to sleep last night — and for the next 364 nights — and the mama will return to school tomorrow. It’s amazing. The Margaret Mead quote in action. I think you would enjoy some of Momastery’s postings, especially about Christianity.

I spent part of the evening at Fullsteam tonight talking with people about how we could become the Foodie City that makes sure everybody eats. We need big ideas and specific actions. The more we talk, the more I am convinced there is enough to go around — enough food, enough housing, enough love. We have to become determined enough to make sure it all gets shared.

Keep talking.

Peace,
Milton

Tonight was the third in our series of gatherings at church to look at what we can do about poverty in Durham. This week’s session was called “Beyond Charity: Addressing Causes and Empowering People.” We heard from three different groups: Circles of Support, which looks to create support teams of four to ten people who commit to helping a family make the transition from homeless to a home; the East Durham Children’s Initiative, which is committed to changing outcomes and expectations for children and families living in a 120-block area of East Durham; and Neighborhood Allies, which focuses on asset based community development. Needless to say, I heard more than I could digest in an hour and a half.

In the final presentation by Camryn and Ernest Smith, a quote went by on one of the Powerpoint slides that grabbed me, even though they didn’t specifically reference it:

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them. — Albert Einstein

In the free association field that is my mind, the first place I went was to a conversation long, long ago in my youth ministry days. I don’t remember where it was, or to whom I was talking, but I remember what they said: never have a generic repeating event. Don’t fall into the pattern of a Fall Retreat, or Disciple Now, or Youth Camp. Even if it is something that happens every year, give it a specific name, a specific theme. Put dates on the t-shirt. Make sure you know why you are doing it — and make sure it’s for reasons other than “it’s an annual event.”

The second place was an article on editing; again, all I remember is what I read. If you want to learn how to be a good editor of your own work, start by taking out your favorite sentence. Make it work its way back into the piece. Make sure you know that nothing is sacred, that anything can change for the sake of what is best.

After that, I thought, “Here’s what’s wrong with Congress: low, same level thinking.” There do not appear to be even a handful of legislators who are thinking transformationally. They are trying to solve the problems exactly as Einstein said they could not. Thinking about them brought me back to thinking about poverty and that I had heard on the radio about the Dow Jones hitting a record high today. The reason, it seems, is because corporate profits have skyrocketed even as wages for workers have stayed flat. This video, which went viral this week, visualizes it well.

Some time during the course of this week — perhaps leaving my part time retail job at the mall — it struck me how many of the people I depend on to be able to do what I want to do in a day don’t make a living wage. A living wage: one that allows them to actually pay the bills and feed their families and have a secure roof over their heads. In North Carolina, it would be in the neighborhood of twenty dollars an hour. When we go to a restaurant, a shop, the mall, a convenience store, or a dry cleaner, talk to the custodian, hired a landscaper, or take our kids to preschool, we rely on people who work and don’t make enough to live. A couple of legislators and the CEO of Costco are working to raise the minimum wage. One of the arguments is if labor costs go up, companies won’t hire new people. (Insert Einstein quote here.)

Camryn said they asked two questions when they worked with communities who wanted to make life better:

• what would you change?
• what would you be willing to do to make it happen?

She was asking my editing question — or at least that’s how I heard it: am I willing to let go of what makes me comfortable to make life better for everyone?

What I loved about all three presentations tonight was they were not talking about what we can go do to save the poor in our community. They were calling us to relationship, to peership, to common ground. “Poor people,” said Carmyn, “know the keys to their own liberation.” What they need is support, engagement: allies. What they need is for us to listen to Jesus: “I was hungry and you fed me . . . .”

What is happening in Durham gives me hope that we are doing more than this year’s Discussion About What We Need To Do. We have a sense of urgency also, thanks to our governor and legislature, who may be throwing witches in the Eno River to see if they float should things continue along their current trends. Still, I am encouraged because we are working on what is in front of us today, on how we can change things now and for the future; this is not a generic event about fixing the Issue du Jour. This is us — all of us — and here we come.

In these days when the distribution of wealth in our country is unconscionable, here we come. As we watch the Supreme Court prepare to undo the Voting Rights Act, here we come. Even though Congress seems determined to make spending cuts at the expense of those who cannot afford it, here we come. Here. In 2013. Face to face.

Tasha Melvin opened her presentation with a quote from Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

I am encouraged because I trust there is not just one small group, but thousands of them around the country — around the world — looking to think larger and deeper, determined not to give into cynicism, and committed to one another.

I saw them tonight.

Peace,
Milton

I spent two and a half hours today with the allergist. (Hang in there — I don’t intend to talk about this for the rest of Lent, I promise.) Since I had done without my medications for a week, I was able for them to do some testing on me, which meant I laid down on my stomach and made a canvas of my back for the nurse who first took a purple washable Crayola marker and made dots — six across and ten down — for all of the different allergens to which I was to be exposed. Then she took a tray of needles and stuck me with a different thing in each of the spots. (Yes, it was as fun as it sounds.) She then left me alone for about fifteen minutes to give the sticks a chance to do their magic. When she returned, she recorded what had happened. Out of all the possibilities, I was allergic to all of them but four: red cedar, mouse, cockroach, and dust mites.

In the discussion that followed, I was not given much hope for change. The doctor talked about what the numbers mean, told me to keep up my fistful of pills regimen, with some adjustment, and to think about whether or not I wanted to begin the three to five year process of seeing if the shots would work to build up my immunity. I knew going in there was no magic trick that was going to cure my allergies, so I had set my expectations accordingly and I left more philosophical than despairing, looking for some larger lesson to take away.

In looking at the dictionary this evening, I found it interesting that the word allergy was not even a part of our vocabulary until 1906 when Clemens E. von Pirquet coined the term — from the Greek allos meaning “other” or “strange” and ergon meaning “reaction.”

Strange reaction.

When the nurse came in about halfway through the process, she looked at my back and said, “The trees and grasses are not your friends.” (The antithesis of what the Little River Band used to sing — “the albatross and the whale they are my brothers.”) That was sad news for me. I really like trees. Grasses, too, though I don’t like to mow. I love to be out in our yard, digging and planting; now I find out my body thinks I’m conspiring with the enemy and keeps calling up reinforcements.

I’ve spent a good bit of time this evening on reframing the whole thing into some sort of lesson or metaphor as a means of helping me figure out how to live in this chronic state of combat, and how to hear what the doctor said while also not letting what feels like resignation be the last word. I have explored some alternative forms of treatment in the past; it’s time to go there again. I love where I live, even if the trees and grasses don’t like me right now; there has to be a way to write a different chapter to this story.

Here in the middle of Lent, in the middle of life, I am face to face with the now and the not yet, the what is and what might be. I am face to face with reality, but I’m not willing to concede what I have been told is the whole story, so I’ll keep sniffing and hoping and praying and sneezing, and trust there is more light yet to break forth.

Peace,
Milton

After writing about allergies, I went to bed with metaphors on my mind and woke up thinking about music as both metaphor and soundtrack for life, or at least those thoughts were running in the background. Before I left for church, I listened again to Scott Simon’s interview with Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell introducing their new record, Old Yellow Moon. Part of the discussion centered around aging and singing. “Can I ask both of you how does your voice change over the years when you hear it and you feel it?” Scott Simon asked them.

“Oh, boy.,” said Emmylou, “I mean, I sound so young and my voice sounds so high and kind of thin to me. I don’t mean in a bad way, but I really have shaken hands with one of my voices right now. I think it’s got a little deeper. It’s got some more grooves in it. And with me it was never about my voice as much as how can I tell the story of this song? And if I really love a song, nothing is going to get in my way because it’s more about the emotion of the story of the song. And if I can’t go as high as I would like then I’m just going to stay low.”

Rodney added, “For me, it’s truly my experience about 10 years ago, as I turned 50, I made peace with my voice. And now I really like the sound of my voice.”

Before church, I sat with a couple of friends who are both musicians and we talked about those performers, like Harris and Crowell, who have continued to write and sing as they have aged and those who have chosen to repeat hits from years ago rather than make a present day offering. Don’t get me wrong. When I see Emmylou perform, I hope with all my heart she will sing “Boulder to Birmingham,” but that song has more life because she has something new to sing as well. Because she has continued to grow, the song keeps growing with her. She isn’t trying to be who she was then; she is being who she is now.

When I sit down in the sanctuary for worship each week, one of the first things I do is look through the worship guide to see what hymns we are going to sing. Music is one of the thin places for me, so I like to see what invitations await. This morning I found one of my favorites: Robert Lowry’s “How Can I Keep From Singing,” which begins:

my life flows on in endless song
above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
that hails a new creation:
through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
it finds an echo in my soul —
how can I keep from singing?

Somewhere in the first couple of lines, I realized the resonance with what had been running through my mind. Lowry’s words were the metaphor in the background: how can I keep from singing? (A parenthetical note: I’m a singer, not a dancer. If this were Ginger’s metaphor, she would choose the latter, I’m sure. The common ground, I suppose, comes from Guy Clark: “You’ve got to sing like you don’t need the money, Love like you’ll never get hurt, You’ve got to dance like there’s nobody watching, It’s got to come from the heart if you want it to work.”)

As Ginger moved into her sermon, she quoted Walter Anderson, an artist and writer who — I found out later — suffered from severe depression:

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have: life itself.

His words made me wonder if he knew Lowry’s lyric, for he was also calling us to hear the music in the circumstance. I’m not suggesting we just tar-la-la our way through the trouble fields as though nothing is happening. Guy Clark, once again:

it don`t matter how much it hurts
you’ve got to tell the truth
some days you write the song
some days the song writes you

And when we sing, whether the songs are old or new, we must sing the song for today. We can’t reach back to make it feel like it used to; a nostalgia fix is about as helpful as pinning it all on the sweet by and by. We sang a new (to me) hymn this morning by Carl Daw, “God of Grace and God of Laughter” — here’s the second verse:

when our lives are torn by sadness,
heal our wounds with tuneful balm;
when all seems discordant madness,
help us find a measured calm.
steady us with music’s anchor
when the storms of life increase;
in the midst of hurt and rancor,
make us instruments of peace.

The music, for me, is both actuality and metaphor, the songs are both sanctuary and symbol. The stacks of CDs in our house and the number of tracks in my iTunes demonstrate that I am not speaking only metaphorically when I say my life has a soundtrack.

no storm can shake my inmost part
while to the Rock I’m clinging
since Love is Lord of heaven and earth
how can I keep from singing?

Indeed.

Peace,
Milton

I go to a famous physician I sleep in the local hotel
From what I can see of the people like me
We get better but we never get well
— Paul Simon, “Allergies”

My week has been marked by my allergies, and in particular preparing to go to see a new allergist on Monday. In anticipation of the appointment, I have had to do without my allergy medication. Monday saw the end of the Allegra and my nasal spray, yesterday I had to stop the Benadryl, and tomorrow I must do without the Singular. All of them are things I take regularly to try and keep myself moving and breathing and not feeling too itchy. Needless to say, this has been a stuffy and itchy week. Though the doctor didn’t give me any rationale for my medicine fast, I assume she wanted to unmask my symptoms so she could get a clear picture of what is going on. The frustrating part for me — or at least the part that leads me to go into Monday with fairly low expectations — is I’ve seen lots of allergists over the years and gone through lots of testing and I think, after all the unmasking, she will probably just give me new masks because Paul Simon is right: “we get better but we never get well.”

In the fall of 2000, I went to the doctor because I was having trouble staying awake. Every time I sat down I fell asleep. After we talked for a bit, she said, “I think you’re suffering from sleep deprivation.” The statement was funny to me because I had spent my life to that point getting by on five maybe six hours of sleep. I had always been the guy who went to be late and got up early. She sent me to what Ginger and I affectionately called Sleep Camp to see if I was suffering from sleep apnea. The testing was supposed to take place over two nights. The first night was for them to see my sleeping patterns and determine if I had the condition. The second night was to fit me for the CPAP, which is the machine that blows air up your nose while you sleep and, well, let’s you actually sleep.

I arrived at Sleep Camp about 10:30 one night, as instructed, and the nurse spent about thirty minutes hooking up all the wires and then he told me to go to sleep, which I did. About 1:30 he came in and woke me up. “There’s no need for you to come back a second night. There’s no question about your apnea. No wonder you’re so tired. You’re sleeping in ninety second increments.” He fitted me with the sleeping apparatus and sent me home with a CPAP and, for the first time I could remember, I woke up feeling rested. What I didn’t see coming was once the mask of the apnea was taken away, I found a deep depression underneath it. I thought I was tired, but I was actually depressed. It took a little longer to learn to live with and through my depression.

One of the keys for coming to terms with it, for me, was in finding metaphors to help explain what was happening to me. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to Paul Simon’s song when my allergies get bad: he helps me turn them into metaphor. I don’t mean I think the allergies themselves stand for something larger as much as they help me to think about how we decide what it is in life that we have to learn to live with, what we feel we can change, and what we choose to mask over by dealing with the symptoms. My take on the medical approach, as far as I can see, is that the energy is all in the masking of symptoms, not in finding a way to do away with them. Some Eastern medical practitioners both think about and treat allergies differently, as though the body is trying to say something, or that they are not something one has to get used to. When Shea, my acupuncturist, talks about them, she talks in more holistic terms about not only my whole body but also my whole being. She doesn’t have easy answers, but it does feel like she is asking better questions.

I am working to challenge myself to do something other than despair on there being any real answers. I have yet to meet my allergist; no need to decide she has already failed. Part of my task is to not settle for dealing with symptoms. Another is to work to find more than one way to look at the problem. I have spent my first fifty-six years dealing with significant allergies on one way or another. My guess is they are going to play some sort of role in most of the rest of my days. Whatever happens physically, I will give thanks tonight for the reminder to look for the masks I allow to settle in my life and to find ways to mix things up from time to time to see what needs to get out from underneath and what needs to be left behind.

Peace,
Milton

As I have gone about my day, the story weaving in and out of all of it has been the Pope’s retirement. To listen to the reporters, this is a day like none other in history. For the first time in six hundred years, someone has ceased to be the Bishop of Rome without ceasing to be. For many people around the world,  February 28th will hold the distinction of being the day the Pope stepped down. As I drove around, I began to wonder what else happened on this day in history; when I stopped, here’s some of what I found:

• 1066 — Westminster Abbey opened.
• 1784 — John Wesley chartered the first Methodist church in America.
• 1953 — Scientists James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick announced they had discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecule that contains the human genes, at Cambridge University.
• 1983 –The album “War” by U2 was released.
• 1993 — A gun battle erupted at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, when Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents tried to serve warrants; four agents and six Davidians were killed and a fifty-one-day standoff began.

Depending on the year, this has been a day of joy, expectation, melody, confusion, and sadness. Like any other day, I suppose. Though the things I listed were somewhat random (I wrote down what caught my eye as I went down the list), it seems each of them has some element of faith, or at least some concept of something larger than ourselves — at least that’s what I picked. Crick and Watson gave us a picture of what wonder looks like at a cellular level alongside of the grandeur of Westminster; John Wesley and David Koresh stand at opposite ends of the continuum of how one lives out a prophetic call; and the U2 record provides the soundtrack: “How long to sing this song?”

Beyond the events that make news, each year has marked a February 28th when someone was born, another died, some got married, some disappeared, some succeeded, some failed, and — for some — nothing happened. In 2000, February had an extra day, which was marked for us that year by the inclusion of a foster daughter into our family. Since leap years only roll around every so often, today is the day in history I give thanks for her arrival. I’m also glad she stayed. Though the official relationship, as far as the state is concerned, ended long ago, she is part of who we are. Since  we moved to Durham, she has flown south every three or four months to see us.

This is a good day in history.

My first semester at Baylor, I took The History of Western Civilization with Dr. Wallace Daniel. He looked like a college professor, down to the wire rimmed glasses and the tweed coat with the patches on the elbows. He even smoked a pipe (it was the Seventies, after all). As he lectured, he would work a small tool in the pipe bowl, pause and light it, take a puff or two, and then put it in his coat pocket. I always imagined one day I would see a small fire come out of there, but it never happened. He did, however, light a fire in me. I became a history major, and in Russian history at that, because I wanted to be in his class. I wanted to learn from him.

He taught his classes with novels, you see. We didn’t get the Big Book of Dates and Wars and Kings. The novelists in any age, he said, are the ones who tell the truth. The facts are easy enough to find; you have to listen to the stories to learn what was really going on. Underneath the wars and royalty, people lived and died, and ate and socialized — that was the real history being made. We read Hard Times to learn about the Industrial Revolution and War and Peace to discover Russia before the Revolution, and as their characters told their stories, we found ourselves in the stream of humanity, for it is in the stories that we find ourselves and find our place.

Many of the media accounts today have focused on the intrigue within the Vatican as Cardinals jockey for position, or the regional politics of whether the next Pope should come from Africa or Latin America; they are not as much news as journalistic filler. A couple of people have talked about what Benedict will do now that he has stepped down: they have described his “stark” new abode, his desire to read and pray, and his inability to assume a public persona having been the pontiff. I appreciated the personal details because they got to the story of the man, beyond the pomp and circumstance.

In this Lenten season, I have been captured by the story of Jesus in the gospels and, as I have mentioned, the lack of detail. My friend, Todd, said in response to my post about  the weather, that the gospel writers only described the height of one person: Zacchaeus; they didn’t say a word about anyone else. Perhaps the lack of detail stands out for me because I find that I want to remember them more and more: the steep angle of the winter sun in the late afternoon, the gorgeous streaks of well-earned grey hair on Ginger’s temples that make her eyes sparkle even more, the collective concentration of those of us gathered this afternoon in Cocoa Cinnamon like pieces in an art installation, the delightful discordance of our children when they stand at the front of the sanctuary and sing, “I am the church, you are the church, we are the church together.”

On this day, I’m heading home to cook dinner for a gathering of family and friends. I expect we will make history.

Peace
Milton